Movie Review: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Yesterday afternoon, the wife and I went to watch the latest Narnia movie, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  As I'm sure most of you know, it was with a different production team than the first two, although most of the characters from the previous movies returned to play the same roles. 

I'd been dreading a loss of production quality in this movie, but things looked really good on the whole.  It's yet another 3D movie, though, when it would have been fine in 2D.  They never really used the 3D to great effect (Avatar's 0-g stuff at the beginning, or Shrek 4's broom dogfight used it well, IMO).  Still, on the up side, it still looked 'Narnian' and there weren't any areas where I thought things looked overly CGI fake.

As far as the story goes, they did change the order up quite a bit.  That didn't detract from the story, though, as in the book each island is more or less an unrelated adventure.  Of course, for the movie things needed to be linked up (Hollywood execs are stupid that way).  Another annoying thing was the insertion of 'green smoke' ever time the evil force that's controlling things tried to temp them.  Now, maybe I'm smarter than your average American movie-goer, but really, I don't think the audience needed that visual cue to know that the characters are being tempted by evil.  I sure didn't.

It was a decent film.  Not great, but if you enjoyed the previous Narnia movies, you'll likely enjoy this one as well.